Some may argue that there is a necessary trade-off between civil liberties and public safety, and that others should just quit their whining. Lets take a look at this proposition (not the whining part). Specifically, let’s ask: how much benefit, in terms of thwarted would-be attacks, does this level of surveillance confer?

Lets start by recognizing that terrorism is extremely rare. So the probability that an individual under surveillance (and now everyone is under surveillance) is also a terrorist is also extremely low. Lets also assume that the neck-beards at the NSA are fairly clever, if exceptionally creepy. We assume that they have devised an algorithm that can detect ‘terrorist communications’ (as opposed to, for instance, pizza orders) with 99% accuracy.

P(+ | bad guy) = 0.99

A job well done, and Murica lives to fight another day. Well, not quite. What we really want to know is: what is the probability that they’ve found a bad guy, given that they’ve gotten a hit on their screen? Or,

P(bad guy | +) =??

Which is quite a different question altogether. To figure this out, we need a bit more information. Recall that bad guys (specifically terrorists) are extremely rare, say on the order of one in a million (this is a wild over estimate with the true rate being much lower, of course – but lets not let that stop us). So,

P(bad guy) = 1/1,000,000

Further, lets say that the spooks have a pretty good algorithm that only comes up falsely positive (ie when the person under surveillance is a good guy) one in one hundred times.